Activist preacher barred at the Capitol door makes a return to Kentucky | Opinion

The last time Rev. William Barber traveled to Kentucky, he didn’t get a very warm welcome.

In 2018, Barber — the North Carolina-based anti-poverty and voting rights activist, inspirational speaker, author and McArthur Genius Grant recipient — brought his reincarnated Poor People’s campaign to the Capitol to protest proposed changes to Medicaid and state police stopped the group at the door. People were allowed in only two at a time, they said, and Barber refused to go in without his group.

Luckily for Lexington, Barber doesn’t hold a grudge. He is giving the keynote address to the Kentuckians For The Commonwealth annual meeting on Saturday at the Lyric Theatre. It’s free and open to the public.

Barber will appear with Louisville poet and activist Hannah Drake, who said she remembered his last time in our state.

“I paired his photo with a photo of Dr. King being stopped by police when I wrote about the hypocrisy of Kentucky,” Drake said. “Outside of knowing the date, which was 2018, you would think this was the same time period. It is not lost on me that Rev. William Barber and Rev. King are fighting for many of the same things and people still refuse to listen. I believe that life allows voices to rise in the midst of chaos to drive us towards cosmos. Barber is one of those voices that continues to be a light in darkness to let many know the bell is tolling for them. At what point will we listen?”

Because of his passionate advocacy for civil rights, often from the public, Barber is often compared to King. That’s why in 2018, he reignited the 1967-68 original Poor People’s Campaign, started after King decided that a civil rights movement led naturally to basic human rights such as healthcare and education. King worked on the campaign for a year before his assassination in Memphis.

Barber is now involved with a group called Repairers of the Breach, which is trying to move beyond politics to create a “moral agenda” on issues such as voting rights, poverty and economic justice.

That’s very much in keeping with KFTC, which has been working on these issues for the past 40 years, and invited Barber to appear in 2018. The group is less famous than it was in the 1980s when it led the fight to abolish the broad form deed, which allowed coal companies to mine for minerals under people’s homes if they owned the mineral rights. But it continues to fight for things like voting rights and environmental justice.

“Rev. Barber has been a voice for the voiceless for quite some time, just to be in his presence will be an honor,” said Dee Parker, a member of the KFTC executive committee who lives in Hazard.

This year, the theme of the annual meeting is “Reckoning with Race,” something Parker said needs to be done across all the issues that KFTC works on, from environmental justice to voting registration.

“We’re shaking tables and making noise and people are listening, and it’s going to move KFTC into the next realm,” Parker said.

The annual meeting will have two events that are open to the public. On July 28 at 7 p.m. at the Lyric, there will be a screening and discussion of the in-progress film, “After the Flood,” which looks at the aftermath of last year’s devastating floods in Eastern Kentucky exactly a year later.

On Saturday, July 29, Barber and Drake will speak at the Lyric from 7-9 p.m.

For more information, go to kftc.org.